Recent surveys of plant engineers show a growing trend toward the utilization of digital sensors combined with greatly increased pressure for ease of use and ease of interfacing. With the current state of industrial fieldbuses these are somewhat contradictory objectives. Most fieldbuses were developed with the intention of replacing field wiring and thus focused on the physical and data link layers. When attention was turned to the application layer little emphasis was paid to the already well-developed world of distributed object computing. It is our belief that substantial progress could be made by adopting the common object request broker architecture as the basis for the application layer in all fieldbus network implementations. This has the considerable advantage that it shifts the focus from message packet structure to abstract description of sensor interfaces that are independent of the language and means of implementation.